This is Liam Guilar's Blog, mostly about poetry, mine and other people's, and anything else of interest. Over the years it has unintentionally developed into an online poetry resource, check the names in the sidebar but Bunting, Yeats, Pound, Joyce, Tennyson and the medieval poets get fair coverage. Lady Godiva and Me was a sequence of poems that linked Lady Godiva, both the historical Godgifu and the legendary Lady G, to a character growing up in the city of Coventry after the second world war.
You can see a short film about the collection Here.
My most recent book of poems, Anhaga is published by Vanzenopress and avialable from my website. Further information, full length articles and sample poems are available on my website Here .

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Friday, April 26, 2013

Pound’s career was driven by his own belief
in the absolute centrality of poetry to Culture and the absolute cultural
importance of the (genuine/professional) capital P Poet.

In Geoffrey Hill’s words, Pound ‘is vulnerable to accusations
that he naively or willingly regarded his war time broadcasts as being in some
way traditionally privileged by his status as a poet, ‘boasting of the sanctity
of what [he] carried’; an attitude at best archaic and worst arrogantly
idiosyncratic; oblivious of, or indifferent to, the ‘real world’ which lies
“out there’, where things (and people) get done” (‘Our word is our bond’, Collected
critical writings p146/7)

Reading the transcript of the trial in Julian Cornell’s ‘The Trial of Ezra
Pound’(1966), one can watch the train wreck of the collision between his ideas and
those of the “real” world where “people get done’.

Pound had been
taken to America to be tried for treason. The Government, or
technically the Department of Justice, contested his Lawyer's claim that Pound
was not 'able to participate with counsel in the trial of a criminal case, and
is not in a position to understand the full nature of the charges against him'.Or in plain terms, was not sane enough
to stand trial.

The following
conversation occurs in the transcript (p208): The answers are fromDr. Joseph L. Gilbert, chief psychiatrist at Gallinger Municipal
Hospital, one of four psychiatrists who had examined Pound and had unanimously
agreed he was not in a fit mental state to stand trial. He is being cross
examined by Mr. Anderson, representing the Unit States Government.

Q: And what are delusion of grandeur? A.
Well, a delusion –I will have to break that up a little bit-is an idea not
based on fact, not appropriate to the occasion, and not amenable to argument
say, so a delusion of grandeur would be an idea of exaggerated importance,
exaggerated self-esteem in his relation to the community, to the state, to the
world. As in this particular case.

Q. In the case of a great person thinking
themselves as great, would you say that is a delusion of grandeur? A. It may of
may not be.

Q. And in case Mr. Pound thinks he is a
great poet, would say that is delusion of grandeur? A. No. I did not consider
that one of his delusions of grandeur.

Q. What did you consider? A. Well his rather
fixed belief that if certain circumstances had arisen that he would have been
able to stop the formation of the so called Axis and, therefore, have avoided the
World War, and that if it had been possible for his writings to have reached
the public, and especially important public officers throughout the world that
the same thing would have happened, that the Axis would not have been formed…and
thereby the World War would have been prevented, and there was a plot or
conspiracy in certain quarters to prevent these writings from reaching the
public [my ellipsis]…and that by his writings, his broadcasts, he was defending
and saving the Constitution of the United states, that his economic theories
were the last word in economy in the world, or in the economic field; that he believed
he was being brought to America , after his imprisonment in Italy, for some use
rather than-[INTERRUPTION IN ORIGINAL]

Q: Rather than
for trial? A. Rather than face an indictment or trial…

Trivial pursuit question: How many ‘Literary
theorists” or ‘cultural critics’
claiming the centrality and importance of their own self importance would be
classifiable under that definition of “delusional”?

Saturday, April 20, 2013

This is the first 3.52 minutes of Bunting's introductory remarks at a reading given at Keats' house in 1979. See previous post for the rest of it. I'm not sure of the first French word so if anyone knows what Pound did say I'd be grateful for the correct/ion reference...

Bunting:

I thought I might perhaps indulge myself in
a few irrelevant words before going on with the reading, then I’ll read you some poems as a
reward for listening to it. It’s because I think this is the last time that I’m
likely to address a London audience,by this time next year I’ll be over eighty and even more reluctant than
I am now to travel away from Northumberland.

So I’d like to take the liberty of telling
you a few things before I go on to read these other short poems.

You know that my friends are dead for the
most part: Yeats, and Pound, Zukofsky, Carlos-Williams, and the other day
Hugh MacDiarmid and perhaps you think I belong to a dead generation that knew
nothing that this generation need listen to.However, my friends are not as dead as all that. It’s not
wise to ignore what they had to say and quite daft to try to go behind them to
the moribund poetry that they superseded.

I’ve noticed in the past few years a darker
reaction than any I remember except at the beginning of the 1930s, In all
things, In politics, social morals, in literature. To be sure, there are always
of course wild men to be laughed at, not pelted, by people who refrain from
making rash experiments in order to follow recipes that have been tried before
and didn’t work. Which is the wilder road I’ll leave you to say; no names, no
pack drill. But I do find a
ridiculous number of young men who are, as Pound said of Dante, (?diablement?)dans les idée’s recu, ideas
of long ago, unburied though rotten.

Of course, I’m thinking chiefly of poetic
techniques, but there’s also a great rush to throw reason overboard and trust
in one magic or another; to achieve wisdom without toil by practising the rites
of some church or other or stilling the argumentative parts of your brain with
drugs. Those who have neither gone Buddhist nor Psychedelic are apt still to
desert God for the church, which exists by concealing God and which is partly responsible
for the revival of censorship by irresponsible police or customs men, for
blasphemy prosecutions and laws against undefined obscenity, for all that Mrs.
Whitehouse symbolizes.

Friday, April 19, 2013

This is a transcription from a part of a talk Bunting gave in London, in Keats house, in 1979. I have taken it from "The Recordings of Basil Bunting" and as always my thanks to Richard Swigg who looks after "The Bunting tapes".

My extract starts at 3.54...after it ends there is applause, a pause and then he reads: "Now we have no hope..." Punctuation is obviously mine, and doesn't do justice to the measured rhythm of his speech.

Poetry hampers itself when it undertakes
advocacy, however indirectly. I would have maintained that, even against my
much loved Hugh MacDiarmid,whose
advocacy was mostly against unreason, for thought and tolerance and
renewal.But poetry that advocates
obscurantism, or, on the other hand, advocates naïve slogans of liberalism, is a nuisance
to everybody who can read.

What I have tried to do is to make
something that can stand by itself and last a little while without having to be
propped by metaphysics or ideology or anything from outside itself,
something that might give people pleasure without nagging them to pay their
dues to the party or say their prayers, without implying the stifling deference
so many people in this country still show to a Cambridge degree or a
Kensington accent.

It’s brought...it's brought me just what I expected from the first;
Nothing. If I set aside the handful of people who over praisemy verses and the few who take the
trouble to run them down, I think
nobody takes any notice of them. Even my publisher hasn’t bothered to let me
know, for all but a year, whether any copies of my collected poems have been
sold or not, and I’ve never seen the book on sale in a book shop. I live on two
small pensions, which together amount to somewhat less than the usual old age
pension, in a house which is not minewhere Northern Arts allows me to stay in part ofnew town planned for the greatest possible density of population, in short
an intentional slum.

I’m not complaining but describing
conditions an honest poet must expect. And they will get worse not better. Yet I think something is
wrong where Arts Administrators draw salaries immeasurably more generous than any
income that they find appropriate for an originating artist. Though they can be
quite generous to performers.

And I think it’s unfortunate, for England, as
well as for myself, that after sixty years of fairly good work without pay, I haven’t even a house of my own to die in.

Well, I’ll put that away, you’ve put up
with it and, well...….[Applause]

Wednesday, April 17, 2013

Bunting looking back on his life:Once upon a time I was a poet; not a very industrious one, not at all an influential one; unread and almost unheard of, but good enough in a small way to interest my friends, whose names have become familiar: Pound and Zukofsky first, Carlos-Williams, Hugh MacDairmid, David Jones, few indeed, but enough to make me think my work was not wasted.

(From Peter Bell's excellent short film about him: which comes as an extra with the equally excellent Bloodaxe edition of Briggflatts.)

It’s called Litotes or perhaps meiosis. I know this because these terms were hammered into me, as a sixth former studying ‘Poetry”, gagging on Keats and Milton and learning to spell paronomasia years before this film was made. But if you listen carefully to the way he says it, there’s a sly undercutting in the pauses, the very slight pauses, between ‘friends’ and “whose names have become familiar”.

Tom Pickard's "Spring Tide" is a fine salutation, but the thing that rings in my head is Bunting's words as preface to a poetry reading in Keats' House in London in 1979, describing the conditions an "honest poet" should expect:

After sixty years of fairly good work, without pay, I haven't even a house of my own to die in.
and the fact his audience seems to giggle in response...